Appreciate this response! I am not sure it quite takes into account the perils of Marxist ideology, however. I am more than certain that Marx himself would have been appalled at the people who call themselves Marxists in the academy today, and that seems to be the primary critique here. That does not discount, however, the danger that his ideologies have posed historically. One must only look to the Soviet Union or Mao's China for a real assessment of what Marxist ideology devolves into when brought into the academy.
You can pose whatever sorts of questions you will about the world—but some questions have dangerous consequences. And, as I said in my article, applying a Marxist critique to literature is missing the point of what literature is supposed to be.
Also yes—I am using "Marxist" as a stand-in for far-leftist, which one can argue *is* reductive, but that is simply because the far left is so homogenous in their thinking that I almost guarantee you that every single one of them will self-identify as a Marxist.
Thanks again for writing! Enjoyed reading this piece, though we may have some disagreements :)
Thank you for reading, and thank you for the thoughtful comment!
I have no intention of defending every aspect of Marx's thought, or how it has been used by his followers -- you quite rightly point out it has been disastrous -- but I don't think that a Marxist reading of literature is necessarily going to lead to the USSR or Mao's China.
Sure, a Marxist reading of literature might be missing the point of what literature is supposed to be, but I don't think there has ever been agreement on what literature is "for" and how it ought to be "used". But that is leading to a much bigger topic, which probably deserves it's own long, thought-out essay.
I appreciate your reading and response -- thanks again.
I lean more towards Liza on this, but appreciate your response to her and both of your good faith conversation!
As much as I think Critical Theory and modern Marxism are highly flawed, I tend to agree that we don't want to censor the censors to get rid of censorship. Meaning, we don't know what thoughts or ideas will lead us, we are not prophets, so completely eradicating these ideas seems on overreaction.
And, the pushback needs to be in the form of the type of open dialogue you two are presenting here. If we can trust that the adherents of Critical Theory will be open to being wrong on occasion and come to compromises, we may get somewhere. I, however, am not holding my breath.
I’m surprised that you think almost every single person you consider on the far-left would self-identify as a Marxist. In my experience, identifying as a Marxist is pretty rare.
It's just easier to summarize it as such. Unfortunately, I have worked with too many who fit what William calls the caricature. There are certainly reasonable people in all realms.
Agreed. It is a poor shorthand I am implementing. I don't have the correct word to describe it. They certainly tend to claim to be anti capitalist, but I think you're right that it isn't necessarily Marxist. I am not a fan of his, but your point is taken.
It's true that PhD students are treated badly, and yes it does seem academic standards are falling everywhere in the Anglosphere (not just at universities) but I find everything else in that article very boring -- the same stuff that William F Buckley was saying from the early '50s.
exactly. even if Marx was out to destroy capitalism (which he wasn't and couldn't, given his family connections and sponsorship), it was others who have used his' and Engels' writings for many other purposes. any -ism (marxism, feminism, nationalism etc etc) will become an explanantion, rallying cry or focus point for policies, political movements and so on, while acquiring a meaning of itself. (yes I've read Marx' Das Kapital in university, quite an experience).
eye-opener. not his arguments that "the masses" were to overthrow capitalism. but his description of the process of industrialisation and its consequences, such as urbanisation, the growing gap between 'haves' and 'have-nots', and the abject levels of poverty among unskilled labourers - all subjects I had heard about before, but in Das Kapital it seemed to all come together. his pleas for education, health care, social laws and reasonable wages were written for the entrepreneurs and (big, industrial) employers: take care of your workers, since they're part of your capital, otherwise you'd be destroying part of your capital goods (and thus lose profit).
it seems exploitation is our middle name, be it feudalism, (neo)colonialism, slavery or human trafficking: how to break this cycle....
Well you two seem to be sorting this out, but "Marx" and variants has become a complex of meanings and usages that are difficult to untangle in real time and across oceans. The obvious analogy would be "liberal." When I was a kid, and at some point with the SPD in Germany, there were actual Marxists. Really. And I was not, but read a fair amount of Marx, etc. And then the world changed, and lots of folks have detected a Marxian sensibility, maybe, in some of my own attention to economic situation, especially in my critique of folks that Liza might call "Marxists" but wouldn't for reasons you suggest . . . Anyway, I'm not going to attempt a real intellectual history, but I think that's what's required if one really wants to straighten things out. Sounds like work. For now, you are both doing great work, and I appreciate the civilized exchange!
I enjoyed this article! I think it's right that blaming Marxism for the state of English departments is probably taking certain kinds of rhetoric too much at face value. Given that "Marx" probably isn't a good explanation of why what you call "American Liberalism" can be like this, what do you think a good explanation would look like? And also, how should we describe the things that Ms. Libes doesn't like?
I've wondered about this a lot. My current understanding emphasizes two causes:
1. Modern universities incentivize original research in all fields. This makes sense in the sciences because they concern structures in nature that where not produced consciously by human beings. Aspects of nature that seem trivial to most human beings can reveal riches when scrutinized. But in literature, one might assume that a great writer is already capable of communicating the meaning that matters to her, in which case the generation of original research might seem unnecessary. So, academics are incentivized to look for fancy theories that make studying literature more like a normal research project in natural science, in that it can justify paying attention to things that would be overlooked or judged trivial by most normal writers and readers. I guess Freud would be an example of this, along with certain kinds of structuralism and its fallout. (I guess the alternative to a research program would put its final emphasis on realizing already existing ideas as one's own experience? Religious organizations seem to me like a model of this.)
2. I tend to think American universities are still very under the influence of German academic culture. A lot of pessimistic ideas about Western civilization seem to me to have developed when Germany experienced its own modernization (which America oddly didn't so much experience since we never had the kinds of feudal traditions that were breaking down in Germany). This kind of pessimism is somewhat rightly associated with Marx, since he was an exemplar of it. But the way that it is received in the US is distorted by the rise of Nazism: the right culture pessimists were almost all discredited (but not Heidegger??), whereas the ones who claimed to follow Marx, fled to the US and got professorships. The violence of the Nazi regime and the war further radicalized people who were subjected to it, especially if they happened to have been raised to see Germany as the final goal of Western history.
Do either of these sound plausible to you, and would you suggest any very different explanations? I still don't understand why American students are so attracted to claims that objective knowledge (or some equivalent term) does not exist.
This was a great article. Thank you. The problem with terms like "Marxism," "fascism," and even "Nazism" is that these words are thrown willy-nilly towards the "other" side without any context or definition, thus it's easy to argue over each other without getting to the heart of argument. I know I've been guilty of this. I do know there's a big difference between reading Marx and his works, and the works of many of his followers and other philosophers, be it Western Marxism, the Frankfurt school etc. I have read much of the Frankfurt school and "critical theory" and have liked some of it, but in general thought it was mostly trash. However, it isn't exactly what some conservative make it out to be.
I too am a Latinist but loathed hearing Marxist critiques at school. It's so boring. Luckily it was articles we had to read in class and not my professors. We read Ovid in class and discussed the censoring of him in some universities but none of that happened at my school. Fortunately my professor thought that was ridiculous, as did the whole class, whom I would assume were more on the leftist side. Thus, the issue of "leftism" is schools and universities is a complicated one to be sure.
Your article was thought provoking but you are quite obviously not American. Academics in this country , at least, whether "Marxist" or not have sought to destroy all beauty and goodness. They are monsters who want to destroy life itself. They are vile liars with no value for truth. They take young people and debilitate them with guilt and nihilism. They are robbing them of all love, meaning, and purpose. They are destroying the humanities so that their garbage is all that anyone will ever know.
Thank you for the comment, Anne. No, I'm not American, so I don't know exactly what the situation is like over there, but I find it hard to believe that ALL academics there are dishonest vandals. It seems there are still many good American academics with a love for the humanities, though now they're working mainly at smaller (and often Catholic) colleges.
William Poulos is Australian. His essay immediately prior to this one is "American Dreams in Australian Towns" and he writes about Australian things a lot.
I think it should make American critics of American academia happy to know that there's a whole literal world of non-American academics like William Poulos out there, who don't suffer all of the same problems as American academia does. Not that that means that academia in other countries doesn't share some of those problems. See this essay, for instance, about an Australian university cutting humanities courses: https://williampoulos.substack.com/p/can-australia-get-any-dumber
Fun fact about Marx: He was mostly supported financially by Frederick Engles who ran a clothing empire which got its cotton from...you guessed it...American slaves.
You're right to point out that Marx was more complex than many proclaim him and his ideas to be now. But I think pointing to Marx himself as the culprit here is a paper-tiger. Marxism now is much different than Marxism in the 19th century during Marx's own time.
Marxism now undergirds fourth-wave feminism (quite anti-men) which is very different from the 1950s or 1970s women's movements...although in her essay on the women's movement in the 70s Joan Didion expertly unpeels the layers and shows how the movement at that time stemmed from Marxism: http://alivingarchive.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/The-Womens-Movement-Joan-Didion.pdf
Marxism was always about class, not race. That's no longer the case. It's been perverted now by identity politics, as has almost everything else on the left. So when Libes discusses Marxism in universities today, she's talking about what one might call Identity Marxism, not genuine original Marxian Marxism.
And on this score I think she's dead right. There's been a massive infestation of this ideology. I've heard it from all corners, including from younger people I know who were in college over the past half decade. If people got back to reading and understanding history, and they discussed Marx as he was back then and focused on class...I think that could be a really interesting and robust debate. But that's not the world we live in now, in 2025.
Thanks for the comment, Michael. I read your piece on Marx -- while I think it's mostly good, I have some problems with it, some of which you've outlined here.
In the early part of your essay you write that you understand Marx through the prism of his own time (rightly so) but then go on to say he invented the notion of notion of “oppressor versus oppressed,” which gives so much fuel to "Woke identity politics."
The "oppressor" idea goes back much further than that: you can see it in Moses and Pharaoh. Furthermore, "woke" and "identity politics" rarely refer to anything definite and are mainly used as rhetorical tags. I don't find them helpful, and I don't see any non-superficial connection they have to Marx.
As I (briefly) argued here, the censorious, navel-gazing group politics you rail against is much more likely to be a product of American liberalism rather than Marxism. Of course, it's possible that there is some faint line back to Marx, but causation of this kind is often very difficult to prove, and so far nobody has given me any convincing argument that Marx is the sole (or even the most important) source of "woke identity politics."
Thanks for writing William, thanks for posting Liza!
It's a nice touch to raise Marx's Shakespearean fandom, but I've never believed it could be literally true that he learned English from Shakespeare. Elizabethan English was pretty much as archaic in Victorian England as it is now, and I don't think launching into...
"Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?
No, Gods, I am no idle votarist!"
...every time he went the bar would have gone down any better on the Tottenham Court Road in the 1850's than it would today
You're right, you didn't, but it is something that's tossed around. Probably my comment is a bit arch though, so I'm now going to get on my platform to unpack why the wider Shakespeare / Marx thing irritates me.
It's definitely true that Karl Marx liked Shakespeare. But is that an interesting fact, something relevant to our understanding of Marx?
German translations of Shakespeare only really started to appear in the mid-18th century. The first complete works in German arrived ~1780. The Sturm and Drang writers were all over it. Schlegel produced translations. Goethe wrote essays, gave speeches, produced adaptations. Schubert, Mendelssohn, Wagner wrote operas and orchestral adaptations. The world's first academic Shakespeare society was founded in Weimar. Shakespeare was phenomenally popular, ubiquitous even, in German intellectual life in the first half of the 19th century.
It would be a noteworthy observation in this context if Marx were somehow against Shakespeare. It's not noteworthy that he's pro-Shakespeare. And the inclusions of Shakespearean quotations in Das Kapital are there at least in part because Marx knows his audience will respond to them.
The more extreme statements - the "Shakespeare was the Bible in our house" stuff - is coming from Eleanor Marx, but she was saying those things in the context of herself trying to forge a career in the English theatre. It's not uncommon for aspiring thespians to big up their engagement with Shakespeare....
"Marx read Shakespeare" is only going to add to your understanding of Marx if you bring to it one of two misconceptions (a) that a German reading Shakespeare is as uncommon as an Englishman reading Schiller or (b) that Marx himself was some kind of monstrous personification of the USSR with no inner life whatsoever.
Marx's love for Shakespeare isn't itself particularly noteworthy -- but I mentioned it in a context where "Marxists" are accused of trying to remove great literature from the curriculum.
I don’t really see why Shakespeare being archaic should have prevented Marx from learning English from him. Archaism is a barrier to someone who just knows the current spoken form of a language, but for someone who doesn’t know any English it might not make a difference.
I’d like to start off this response to Mr. Poulos’ intriguing article with a round of applause! 👏👏👏 I’d like to commend you for your civility and respectful and cordial disagreement with Liza! This is refreshing and something we need much more of in modern-day America! I must say that although I found this article to be fascinating to read and I did learn some historical facts I hadn’t previously known such as Marx’s love for William Shakespeare and his opposition to press censorship, I didn’t agree with its central argument. Marxism is definitely a threat to the humanities. You define Marxism as being attentive to a works social and political context. But this is not the point of literature. The social and political context of a great work of literature is irrelevant. What matters is the profound universal and timeless messages that these works have to give us. That’s what the Humanities is about, teaching us about life and ourselves and broadening our minds with new ideas, not to analyze things like class or political struggles of the time period. The only exception would be if it is relevant to that specific work of literature. Otherwise, you are distorting that work of literature, using it for purposes that were never intended and disrespecting the author. It is true that Marx, Foucault and Judith Butler have their differences. But I think Liza’s overall point, is that they hold extreme left-wing views that have proven to be quite toxic for society and have perverted American and English literature. Yes, critical theory was in response to Marxism, but that doesn’t change that it has no place in the Humanities. To be fair, William did say he has no intention of defending every aspect of Marxist thought or how some of Marx’s followers took his ideas and used them for evil. That is to be commended to be sure. But the thing is, that’s just the problem with Marxism. Its utopian aims could only be achieved using brute force and massive doses of violence. This is exactly why Marxism led to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people all over the globe. You can only achieve Communist aims by getting rid of those who disagree with you and forcing everyone to enact your will. That’s not even to scratch the surface of the many things that were wrong with Marx’s thinking. Not to mention what an objectionable person Karl Marx himself was. Marx was a racist, sexist, homophobe, and anti-Semite (ironically given his own Jewish heritage). Marx hated blacks, Slavs, the Chinese, and Jews with a passion. I also don’t agree that Liza’s judgement of Edward Said was incorrect. Said saw the Jews as just the latest “Orientalist” oppressors of Arabs, bragged about throwing rocks at IDF soldiers during the First Intifada, said the most interesting Jews to him were the ones not committed to their Jewishness, palled around with murderous dictator and terrorist Yasser Arafat, and opposed the Oslo Peace Accords. Marxism subverts the very purpose of the Humanities away from the pursuit excellence, wisdom and beauty to turning students into mindless robots who just go around seeing the world through the lenses of class and identity and can’t see people as individuals but as colors, genders, sexualities, etc. You also don’t take into account what Marxism in practice has always led to-death, destruction and bloodshed. Just look at the USSR, Red China, East Germany, Cuba, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Poland, Hungary, Romania, etc. It hasn’t been good for us here in the West and is a factor in why are universities are in such dreadful shape. All that being said, this was a well-written piece and I respect that you wrote it in response to Liza in such a kind and respectful way! You are clearly a gentleman of the highest order! Much respect for you Mr. Poulos! 🫡
-- "The social and political context of a great work of literature is irrelevant." I disagree. Art isn't produced in a vacuum, and knowing the context of a great work will help you understand it (and its timeless message) better. Do you think you can fully appreciate Jane Austen's novels without knowing something of her social and political context?
-- As I've said to other people in the comments section here, I am still awaiting an argument that proves Marx is the sole (or most important) inspiration to the young "mindless robots" you talk about. And I think it's ridiculous to think that a Marxist reading of literature is necessarily going to lead to a new USSR or East Germany.
-- Well, as with everything involving Edward Said, it's somewhat controversial. I don't think his arguments were directed against Judaism or Jewish people but against specific Israeli policies.
It’s nice to see two people disagree civilly. Let me add my two cents.
When I was at the University of Chicago in the 1990s studying for my PhD in English literature, most of the professors were what I called at the time “watered downMarxists. “ few of any would’ve called themselves a Marxists per se, but they mostly maintained among them that Marxist theory was the smartest theory going. At that time, Terry Egleton was the big name, and he was explicitly Marxist, and he literally wrote the book on literary theory for the average student.
The fact that Marx knew Greek, etc., is pretty irrelevant to all of this. Markist was not himself a literary theorist, but his ideology is absolutely behind the literary theorists that Lisa is discussing.
Christianity doesn’t look exactly the way Jesus framed it. Islam doesn’t look exactly the way Muhammad framed it. Psychoanalysis doesn’t look exactly the way Freud framed it. The founder of a movement is not responsible for every single iteration on the one hand, and on the other hand, cannot be separated from the fruit of their tree on the other.
The fact that the Frankfurt School and others revised Marks does not separate them from Marxism. It makes them neo-Marxist but Marxists all the same.
Likewise, pointing out that there’s disagreement among leftists does not make the label "left" unuseful. The vast majority of literary critics writing over the past few decades are, in fact, leftists. They may disagree in their leftism, but they agree in their hatred of the West and, very often, in their hatred of the very literature that they critique.
Their aim has consistently been to unseat the authority of great writers and artists, exposing them as perpetrators of oppression. Alternatively, they sometimes portray these same writers as subversives undermining oppression, regardless of what those writers may have "intended" or how they may have been received.
What the alternative is now that we’ve been through four or five decades of this sort of thing is an open question, and that is why students are fleeing English Departments.
Creative writing, which I teach more than literature, does offer an alternative: craft analysis and appreciation. But that is not the approach that generates article after article on the same text.
That brings us to one of the great ironies of all this.
Much of the Marxism in literary studies has been driven by a relentless professionalism, a relentless competition for a small amount of privileged tenure-track jobs, that forced a lot of people to publish nonsense to build their publication record.
I, myself, was pressured--though I largely resisted--to take a "postcolonial" approach in my dissertation because that would make me more marketable. I got away with just a nod in that direction--though it would undoubtedly have been in my favor to have gone in whole hog. The result, however, might have been that I would have then been locked into such a theory for much of my career. I'm glad I didn't.
Terry Eagleton also wrote "After Theory" twenty years ago arguing that theory today is mostly empty and avoids all the important questions. The most incisive critics of critical theory have mostly been Marxists or socialists of some sort.
"The founder of a movement is not responsible for every single iteration on the one hand, and on the other hand, cannot be separated from the fruit of their tree on the other."
But Marx wasn't a "founder" of theory, so I don't see why this is relevant. You could say (with equal justice) that the concern for the poor and marginalised is downstream from Christianity, so in fact Christ is to blame.
Again, I'm not trying to justify everything that happens in Marx's name, or everything that goes on in the academy. I just think blaming "Marxism" for everything unpleasant is sloppy and misleading.
I’m not sure I get your point about Eagleton because basically you just said that Eagleton argued that the most incisive critics were Marxist, which is exactly what people were saying at the university of Chicago in the 1990s. As I said. If you wanted to distinguish Marx from socialism, I guess you can. It may be more accurate to say leftist or socialist than Marxist. But there certainly was a lot of Marxism and certainly is a lot of Marxism of one sort or another in literary theory and literary practice. And the critique of culture is inspired by Marx, so you’re just playing semantic game despair Marx the blame for what evolved out of his philosophy.
Post structuralism strictly speaking need not have been Marxist but in practice, it’s philosophy and methods were adopted by Marxist inspired critics.
And yes, caring for the poor downstream of Christianity, and Christianity is downstream of Judaism .
And by the way, the fact that Marxist is criticized theory doesn’t mean they weren’t criticizing Marxist inspired theory. It just wasn’t pure enough for them.
A classic Freudian would find much to criticize in 1960s and 70s psychoanalysis, but you can’t divorce psychoanalysis from Freud. Though it’s also true it wouldn’t make sense to call all psychoanalysis Freudian, so I guess we have some agreement.
Right, but my point is that I don't think there's something necessarily wrong with Marxist analysis. Even the most rabid anti-Marxist in the world can't seriously argue that Mr Eagleton's contribution to literary criticism and analysis is worthless.
Appreciate this response! I am not sure it quite takes into account the perils of Marxist ideology, however. I am more than certain that Marx himself would have been appalled at the people who call themselves Marxists in the academy today, and that seems to be the primary critique here. That does not discount, however, the danger that his ideologies have posed historically. One must only look to the Soviet Union or Mao's China for a real assessment of what Marxist ideology devolves into when brought into the academy.
You can pose whatever sorts of questions you will about the world—but some questions have dangerous consequences. And, as I said in my article, applying a Marxist critique to literature is missing the point of what literature is supposed to be.
Also yes—I am using "Marxist" as a stand-in for far-leftist, which one can argue *is* reductive, but that is simply because the far left is so homogenous in their thinking that I almost guarantee you that every single one of them will self-identify as a Marxist.
Thanks again for writing! Enjoyed reading this piece, though we may have some disagreements :)
Thank you for reading, and thank you for the thoughtful comment!
I have no intention of defending every aspect of Marx's thought, or how it has been used by his followers -- you quite rightly point out it has been disastrous -- but I don't think that a Marxist reading of literature is necessarily going to lead to the USSR or Mao's China.
Sure, a Marxist reading of literature might be missing the point of what literature is supposed to be, but I don't think there has ever been agreement on what literature is "for" and how it ought to be "used". But that is leading to a much bigger topic, which probably deserves it's own long, thought-out essay.
I appreciate your reading and response -- thanks again.
I lean more towards Liza on this, but appreciate your response to her and both of your good faith conversation!
As much as I think Critical Theory and modern Marxism are highly flawed, I tend to agree that we don't want to censor the censors to get rid of censorship. Meaning, we don't know what thoughts or ideas will lead us, we are not prophets, so completely eradicating these ideas seems on overreaction.
And, the pushback needs to be in the form of the type of open dialogue you two are presenting here. If we can trust that the adherents of Critical Theory will be open to being wrong on occasion and come to compromises, we may get somewhere. I, however, am not holding my breath.
Great reads. Thanks!
Thanks for the comment. Most theorists are much more open than the caricature of them suggests.
I’m surprised that you think almost every single person you consider on the far-left would self-identify as a Marxist. In my experience, identifying as a Marxist is pretty rare.
Exactly. As I mentioned in the piece: during my time at university I met only one self-professed Marxist.
It's just easier to summarize it as such. Unfortunately, I have worked with too many who fit what William calls the caricature. There are certainly reasonable people in all realms.
Is it? I think I know the sort of person you're talking about but their politics doesn't have anything to do with Marx.
Agreed. It is a poor shorthand I am implementing. I don't have the correct word to describe it. They certainly tend to claim to be anti capitalist, but I think you're right that it isn't necessarily Marxist. I am not a fan of his, but your point is taken.
If you are amenable, I am curious what your thoughts are on this article, which for me, is pretty accurate for KY experience in public education.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jdhaltigan/p/colleges-and-universities-produce?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=n2o0c
It's true that PhD students are treated badly, and yes it does seem academic standards are falling everywhere in the Anglosphere (not just at universities) but I find everything else in that article very boring -- the same stuff that William F Buckley was saying from the early '50s.
Much obliged! I haven't read Buckley so much as seen him talk. 🙏
Karl Marx is related to the Rothschild family (cousin). 'nuff said.
Even if that's true I don't see how it's relevant.
exactly. even if Marx was out to destroy capitalism (which he wasn't and couldn't, given his family connections and sponsorship), it was others who have used his' and Engels' writings for many other purposes. any -ism (marxism, feminism, nationalism etc etc) will become an explanantion, rallying cry or focus point for policies, political movements and so on, while acquiring a meaning of itself. (yes I've read Marx' Das Kapital in university, quite an experience).
What did you think of Das Kapital?
eye-opener. not his arguments that "the masses" were to overthrow capitalism. but his description of the process of industrialisation and its consequences, such as urbanisation, the growing gap between 'haves' and 'have-nots', and the abject levels of poverty among unskilled labourers - all subjects I had heard about before, but in Das Kapital it seemed to all come together. his pleas for education, health care, social laws and reasonable wages were written for the entrepreneurs and (big, industrial) employers: take care of your workers, since they're part of your capital, otherwise you'd be destroying part of your capital goods (and thus lose profit).
it seems exploitation is our middle name, be it feudalism, (neo)colonialism, slavery or human trafficking: how to break this cycle....
Well you two seem to be sorting this out, but "Marx" and variants has become a complex of meanings and usages that are difficult to untangle in real time and across oceans. The obvious analogy would be "liberal." When I was a kid, and at some point with the SPD in Germany, there were actual Marxists. Really. And I was not, but read a fair amount of Marx, etc. And then the world changed, and lots of folks have detected a Marxian sensibility, maybe, in some of my own attention to economic situation, especially in my critique of folks that Liza might call "Marxists" but wouldn't for reasons you suggest . . . Anyway, I'm not going to attempt a real intellectual history, but I think that's what's required if one really wants to straighten things out. Sounds like work. For now, you are both doing great work, and I appreciate the civilized exchange!
Thanks for the comment! Yes, "Marxist" is probably too vague a label to be useful.
I enjoyed this article! I think it's right that blaming Marxism for the state of English departments is probably taking certain kinds of rhetoric too much at face value. Given that "Marx" probably isn't a good explanation of why what you call "American Liberalism" can be like this, what do you think a good explanation would look like? And also, how should we describe the things that Ms. Libes doesn't like?
I've wondered about this a lot. My current understanding emphasizes two causes:
1. Modern universities incentivize original research in all fields. This makes sense in the sciences because they concern structures in nature that where not produced consciously by human beings. Aspects of nature that seem trivial to most human beings can reveal riches when scrutinized. But in literature, one might assume that a great writer is already capable of communicating the meaning that matters to her, in which case the generation of original research might seem unnecessary. So, academics are incentivized to look for fancy theories that make studying literature more like a normal research project in natural science, in that it can justify paying attention to things that would be overlooked or judged trivial by most normal writers and readers. I guess Freud would be an example of this, along with certain kinds of structuralism and its fallout. (I guess the alternative to a research program would put its final emphasis on realizing already existing ideas as one's own experience? Religious organizations seem to me like a model of this.)
2. I tend to think American universities are still very under the influence of German academic culture. A lot of pessimistic ideas about Western civilization seem to me to have developed when Germany experienced its own modernization (which America oddly didn't so much experience since we never had the kinds of feudal traditions that were breaking down in Germany). This kind of pessimism is somewhat rightly associated with Marx, since he was an exemplar of it. But the way that it is received in the US is distorted by the rise of Nazism: the right culture pessimists were almost all discredited (but not Heidegger??), whereas the ones who claimed to follow Marx, fled to the US and got professorships. The violence of the Nazi regime and the war further radicalized people who were subjected to it, especially if they happened to have been raised to see Germany as the final goal of Western history.
Do either of these sound plausible to you, and would you suggest any very different explanations? I still don't understand why American students are so attracted to claims that objective knowledge (or some equivalent term) does not exist.
This was a great article. Thank you. The problem with terms like "Marxism," "fascism," and even "Nazism" is that these words are thrown willy-nilly towards the "other" side without any context or definition, thus it's easy to argue over each other without getting to the heart of argument. I know I've been guilty of this. I do know there's a big difference between reading Marx and his works, and the works of many of his followers and other philosophers, be it Western Marxism, the Frankfurt school etc. I have read much of the Frankfurt school and "critical theory" and have liked some of it, but in general thought it was mostly trash. However, it isn't exactly what some conservative make it out to be.
I too am a Latinist but loathed hearing Marxist critiques at school. It's so boring. Luckily it was articles we had to read in class and not my professors. We read Ovid in class and discussed the censoring of him in some universities but none of that happened at my school. Fortunately my professor thought that was ridiculous, as did the whole class, whom I would assume were more on the leftist side. Thus, the issue of "leftism" is schools and universities is a complicated one to be sure.
Thanks for the comment! You're right about the use of vague terms and how critical theory isn't really what most of its detractors think it is.
Your article was thought provoking but you are quite obviously not American. Academics in this country , at least, whether "Marxist" or not have sought to destroy all beauty and goodness. They are monsters who want to destroy life itself. They are vile liars with no value for truth. They take young people and debilitate them with guilt and nihilism. They are robbing them of all love, meaning, and purpose. They are destroying the humanities so that their garbage is all that anyone will ever know.
Thank you for the comment, Anne. No, I'm not American, so I don't know exactly what the situation is like over there, but I find it hard to believe that ALL academics there are dishonest vandals. It seems there are still many good American academics with a love for the humanities, though now they're working mainly at smaller (and often Catholic) colleges.
William Poulos is Australian. His essay immediately prior to this one is "American Dreams in Australian Towns" and he writes about Australian things a lot.
I think it should make American critics of American academia happy to know that there's a whole literal world of non-American academics like William Poulos out there, who don't suffer all of the same problems as American academia does. Not that that means that academia in other countries doesn't share some of those problems. See this essay, for instance, about an Australian university cutting humanities courses: https://williampoulos.substack.com/p/can-australia-get-any-dumber
Thank you, Doctrix!
Marx was a fascinating person. Here's my in-depth, nuanced essay on him: https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/karl-marx-revisited-jonathan-sperbers
Fun fact about Marx: He was mostly supported financially by Frederick Engles who ran a clothing empire which got its cotton from...you guessed it...American slaves.
You're right to point out that Marx was more complex than many proclaim him and his ideas to be now. But I think pointing to Marx himself as the culprit here is a paper-tiger. Marxism now is much different than Marxism in the 19th century during Marx's own time.
Marxism now undergirds fourth-wave feminism (quite anti-men) which is very different from the 1950s or 1970s women's movements...although in her essay on the women's movement in the 70s Joan Didion expertly unpeels the layers and shows how the movement at that time stemmed from Marxism: http://alivingarchive.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/The-Womens-Movement-Joan-Didion.pdf
Marxism was always about class, not race. That's no longer the case. It's been perverted now by identity politics, as has almost everything else on the left. So when Libes discusses Marxism in universities today, she's talking about what one might call Identity Marxism, not genuine original Marxian Marxism.
And on this score I think she's dead right. There's been a massive infestation of this ideology. I've heard it from all corners, including from younger people I know who were in college over the past half decade. If people got back to reading and understanding history, and they discussed Marx as he was back then and focused on class...I think that could be a really interesting and robust debate. But that's not the world we live in now, in 2025.
~
Michael Mohr
"Sincere American Writing"
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
Thanks for the comment, Michael. I read your piece on Marx -- while I think it's mostly good, I have some problems with it, some of which you've outlined here.
In the early part of your essay you write that you understand Marx through the prism of his own time (rightly so) but then go on to say he invented the notion of notion of “oppressor versus oppressed,” which gives so much fuel to "Woke identity politics."
The "oppressor" idea goes back much further than that: you can see it in Moses and Pharaoh. Furthermore, "woke" and "identity politics" rarely refer to anything definite and are mainly used as rhetorical tags. I don't find them helpful, and I don't see any non-superficial connection they have to Marx.
As I (briefly) argued here, the censorious, navel-gazing group politics you rail against is much more likely to be a product of American liberalism rather than Marxism. Of course, it's possible that there is some faint line back to Marx, but causation of this kind is often very difficult to prove, and so far nobody has given me any convincing argument that Marx is the sole (or even the most important) source of "woke identity politics."
Thoughtful. But just wait, Shakespeare's next. The principle of rewriting history has taken root like an invasive species. We'll never be rid of it.
These people will have to wrench Shakespeare from my cold, dead hands!
We a cold, dead hands emoji.
Shakespeare has already been removed from curriculum.
There are English departments that don't teach ANY Shakespeare? Where?
No, there are English departments that have taken Shakespeare off the required reading list though
Appalling, and a dereliction of duty.
Can someone undertake a revisionist interpretation of Shakespeare as "woke" or do we need more drastic measures to remove the infected organs?
If you go to the theatre, many such productions of Shakespeare already exist.
Thanks for writing William, thanks for posting Liza!
It's a nice touch to raise Marx's Shakespearean fandom, but I've never believed it could be literally true that he learned English from Shakespeare. Elizabethan English was pretty much as archaic in Victorian England as it is now, and I don't think launching into...
"Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?
No, Gods, I am no idle votarist!"
...every time he went the bar would have gone down any better on the Tottenham Court Road in the 1850's than it would today
Sure, but I didn't say it was his sole way of learning English.
You're right, you didn't, but it is something that's tossed around. Probably my comment is a bit arch though, so I'm now going to get on my platform to unpack why the wider Shakespeare / Marx thing irritates me.
It's definitely true that Karl Marx liked Shakespeare. But is that an interesting fact, something relevant to our understanding of Marx?
German translations of Shakespeare only really started to appear in the mid-18th century. The first complete works in German arrived ~1780. The Sturm and Drang writers were all over it. Schlegel produced translations. Goethe wrote essays, gave speeches, produced adaptations. Schubert, Mendelssohn, Wagner wrote operas and orchestral adaptations. The world's first academic Shakespeare society was founded in Weimar. Shakespeare was phenomenally popular, ubiquitous even, in German intellectual life in the first half of the 19th century.
It would be a noteworthy observation in this context if Marx were somehow against Shakespeare. It's not noteworthy that he's pro-Shakespeare. And the inclusions of Shakespearean quotations in Das Kapital are there at least in part because Marx knows his audience will respond to them.
The more extreme statements - the "Shakespeare was the Bible in our house" stuff - is coming from Eleanor Marx, but she was saying those things in the context of herself trying to forge a career in the English theatre. It's not uncommon for aspiring thespians to big up their engagement with Shakespeare....
"Marx read Shakespeare" is only going to add to your understanding of Marx if you bring to it one of two misconceptions (a) that a German reading Shakespeare is as uncommon as an Englishman reading Schiller or (b) that Marx himself was some kind of monstrous personification of the USSR with no inner life whatsoever.
Marx's love for Shakespeare isn't itself particularly noteworthy -- but I mentioned it in a context where "Marxists" are accused of trying to remove great literature from the curriculum.
I don’t really see why Shakespeare being archaic should have prevented Marx from learning English from him. Archaism is a barrier to someone who just knows the current spoken form of a language, but for someone who doesn’t know any English it might not make a difference.
I’d like to start off this response to Mr. Poulos’ intriguing article with a round of applause! 👏👏👏 I’d like to commend you for your civility and respectful and cordial disagreement with Liza! This is refreshing and something we need much more of in modern-day America! I must say that although I found this article to be fascinating to read and I did learn some historical facts I hadn’t previously known such as Marx’s love for William Shakespeare and his opposition to press censorship, I didn’t agree with its central argument. Marxism is definitely a threat to the humanities. You define Marxism as being attentive to a works social and political context. But this is not the point of literature. The social and political context of a great work of literature is irrelevant. What matters is the profound universal and timeless messages that these works have to give us. That’s what the Humanities is about, teaching us about life and ourselves and broadening our minds with new ideas, not to analyze things like class or political struggles of the time period. The only exception would be if it is relevant to that specific work of literature. Otherwise, you are distorting that work of literature, using it for purposes that were never intended and disrespecting the author. It is true that Marx, Foucault and Judith Butler have their differences. But I think Liza’s overall point, is that they hold extreme left-wing views that have proven to be quite toxic for society and have perverted American and English literature. Yes, critical theory was in response to Marxism, but that doesn’t change that it has no place in the Humanities. To be fair, William did say he has no intention of defending every aspect of Marxist thought or how some of Marx’s followers took his ideas and used them for evil. That is to be commended to be sure. But the thing is, that’s just the problem with Marxism. Its utopian aims could only be achieved using brute force and massive doses of violence. This is exactly why Marxism led to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people all over the globe. You can only achieve Communist aims by getting rid of those who disagree with you and forcing everyone to enact your will. That’s not even to scratch the surface of the many things that were wrong with Marx’s thinking. Not to mention what an objectionable person Karl Marx himself was. Marx was a racist, sexist, homophobe, and anti-Semite (ironically given his own Jewish heritage). Marx hated blacks, Slavs, the Chinese, and Jews with a passion. I also don’t agree that Liza’s judgement of Edward Said was incorrect. Said saw the Jews as just the latest “Orientalist” oppressors of Arabs, bragged about throwing rocks at IDF soldiers during the First Intifada, said the most interesting Jews to him were the ones not committed to their Jewishness, palled around with murderous dictator and terrorist Yasser Arafat, and opposed the Oslo Peace Accords. Marxism subverts the very purpose of the Humanities away from the pursuit excellence, wisdom and beauty to turning students into mindless robots who just go around seeing the world through the lenses of class and identity and can’t see people as individuals but as colors, genders, sexualities, etc. You also don’t take into account what Marxism in practice has always led to-death, destruction and bloodshed. Just look at the USSR, Red China, East Germany, Cuba, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Poland, Hungary, Romania, etc. It hasn’t been good for us here in the West and is a factor in why are universities are in such dreadful shape. All that being said, this was a well-written piece and I respect that you wrote it in response to Liza in such a kind and respectful way! You are clearly a gentleman of the highest order! Much respect for you Mr. Poulos! 🫡
Thank you for the kind words, Noah!
-- "The social and political context of a great work of literature is irrelevant." I disagree. Art isn't produced in a vacuum, and knowing the context of a great work will help you understand it (and its timeless message) better. Do you think you can fully appreciate Jane Austen's novels without knowing something of her social and political context?
-- As I've said to other people in the comments section here, I am still awaiting an argument that proves Marx is the sole (or most important) inspiration to the young "mindless robots" you talk about. And I think it's ridiculous to think that a Marxist reading of literature is necessarily going to lead to a new USSR or East Germany.
-- Well, as with everything involving Edward Said, it's somewhat controversial. I don't think his arguments were directed against Judaism or Jewish people but against specific Israeli policies.
It’s nice to see two people disagree civilly. Let me add my two cents.
When I was at the University of Chicago in the 1990s studying for my PhD in English literature, most of the professors were what I called at the time “watered downMarxists. “ few of any would’ve called themselves a Marxists per se, but they mostly maintained among them that Marxist theory was the smartest theory going. At that time, Terry Egleton was the big name, and he was explicitly Marxist, and he literally wrote the book on literary theory for the average student.
The fact that Marx knew Greek, etc., is pretty irrelevant to all of this. Markist was not himself a literary theorist, but his ideology is absolutely behind the literary theorists that Lisa is discussing.
Christianity doesn’t look exactly the way Jesus framed it. Islam doesn’t look exactly the way Muhammad framed it. Psychoanalysis doesn’t look exactly the way Freud framed it. The founder of a movement is not responsible for every single iteration on the one hand, and on the other hand, cannot be separated from the fruit of their tree on the other.
The fact that the Frankfurt School and others revised Marks does not separate them from Marxism. It makes them neo-Marxist but Marxists all the same.
Likewise, pointing out that there’s disagreement among leftists does not make the label "left" unuseful. The vast majority of literary critics writing over the past few decades are, in fact, leftists. They may disagree in their leftism, but they agree in their hatred of the West and, very often, in their hatred of the very literature that they critique.
Their aim has consistently been to unseat the authority of great writers and artists, exposing them as perpetrators of oppression. Alternatively, they sometimes portray these same writers as subversives undermining oppression, regardless of what those writers may have "intended" or how they may have been received.
What the alternative is now that we’ve been through four or five decades of this sort of thing is an open question, and that is why students are fleeing English Departments.
Creative writing, which I teach more than literature, does offer an alternative: craft analysis and appreciation. But that is not the approach that generates article after article on the same text.
That brings us to one of the great ironies of all this.
Much of the Marxism in literary studies has been driven by a relentless professionalism, a relentless competition for a small amount of privileged tenure-track jobs, that forced a lot of people to publish nonsense to build their publication record.
I, myself, was pressured--though I largely resisted--to take a "postcolonial" approach in my dissertation because that would make me more marketable. I got away with just a nod in that direction--though it would undoubtedly have been in my favor to have gone in whole hog. The result, however, might have been that I would have then been locked into such a theory for much of my career. I'm glad I didn't.
There, I guess that’s more than two cents.
Terry Eagleton also wrote "After Theory" twenty years ago arguing that theory today is mostly empty and avoids all the important questions. The most incisive critics of critical theory have mostly been Marxists or socialists of some sort.
"The founder of a movement is not responsible for every single iteration on the one hand, and on the other hand, cannot be separated from the fruit of their tree on the other."
But Marx wasn't a "founder" of theory, so I don't see why this is relevant. You could say (with equal justice) that the concern for the poor and marginalised is downstream from Christianity, so in fact Christ is to blame.
Again, I'm not trying to justify everything that happens in Marx's name, or everything that goes on in the academy. I just think blaming "Marxism" for everything unpleasant is sloppy and misleading.
I’m not sure I get your point about Eagleton because basically you just said that Eagleton argued that the most incisive critics were Marxist, which is exactly what people were saying at the university of Chicago in the 1990s. As I said. If you wanted to distinguish Marx from socialism, I guess you can. It may be more accurate to say leftist or socialist than Marxist. But there certainly was a lot of Marxism and certainly is a lot of Marxism of one sort or another in literary theory and literary practice. And the critique of culture is inspired by Marx, so you’re just playing semantic game despair Marx the blame for what evolved out of his philosophy.
Post structuralism strictly speaking need not have been Marxist but in practice, it’s philosophy and methods were adopted by Marxist inspired critics.
And yes, caring for the poor downstream of Christianity, and Christianity is downstream of Judaism .
And by the way, the fact that Marxist is criticized theory doesn’t mean they weren’t criticizing Marxist inspired theory. It just wasn’t pure enough for them.
A classic Freudian would find much to criticize in 1960s and 70s psychoanalysis, but you can’t divorce psychoanalysis from Freud. Though it’s also true it wouldn’t make sense to call all psychoanalysis Freudian, so I guess we have some agreement.
Right, but my point is that I don't think there's something necessarily wrong with Marxist analysis. Even the most rabid anti-Marxist in the world can't seriously argue that Mr Eagleton's contribution to literary criticism and analysis is worthless.